The Palm Pre will hit the stores on Saturday, June 6, and it has a very important task to fulfil. Contrary to what the sensationlist media want you to believe, that task is not to dethrone the iPhone, but to save a flailing company. Palm requires for its very survival that the Pre and its brand-new operating system webOS is a success. CNet has taken the Palm Pre through its paces, and despite some flaws, they were quite pleased, especially on the software front. Update:Another review, from Engadget: "To put it simply, the Pre is a great phone, and we don't feel any hesitation saying that."

In theory tasks that run in the background can effect battery life. Practice has shown many times it doesn't effect battery life significantly.

Only one task can be the foreground application in every major OS with a GUI. Anything not running in the foreground (with focus) is running as concurrently as a background process would. There's little difference, other than the fact that most background processes are not displaying their UI.

But you're right, multitasking is not the same as running processes in the background (or indeed concurrently.) A process can be made up of one or more threads. Processes, by definition, will use at least one thread, but potentially more that that. There is nothing within the iPhone SDK that prevents multithreading, nothing at all. But multithreading is not the same as running multiple processes; I believe this is where your argument is a little confused?